Blogging using Jekyll and GitHub

This blog is published using Jekyll and GitHub pages so I wanted to share my experience with it.

First the good:

The price is right. Thank you GitHub for free hosting. Yes, you can run a free Wordpress site on wordpress.com but last time I tried it you could not install your own themes or plugins.

Do you really the extra overhead of Wordpress (MySQL DB, web server, etc) and 5K plugins (which can slow down your site)? I just want simple HTML content out there.

Scalabilty and reliability. No platform is 100% reliable but I trust GitHub more than some $5/month Wordpress hosting site.

Content back up and revision history are dead simple with git pull. I have a copy of this blog on my laptop and on my home desktop. With Wordpress I have to backup content in DB separately from the custom themes.

Ability to move my site. If tomorrow I do not like GitHub I can easily switch to AWS S3 or another solution.

Now the not so good:

No WYSIWYG. Markdown is better than writing raw HTML but still.

This a tool for techies. I don’t think marketing or sales folks would be comfortable with Liquid templates and git commands.

I wish there was a simpler way to install and switch themes (this is where Wordpress is better).

Since your site is static HTML it limits your ability to integrate things like search or ability for users to login.

Wordpress is a powerful CMS which gives you ability to drag and drop widgets around your screen, customizing your pages look & feel.

But overall I have been really enjoying using Jekyll / GitHub for blogging and plan to continue using it for now.